India's vulnerability to spying activities by unfriendly nations in the Internet era has forced the government to chalk out a Rs.450-crore plan to develop and deploy a pan-India secure network and network-based services such as email and Internet-telephony, thus providing a foolproof infrastructure for telecom and Internet communication exclusively for government use.
The government does not want any official communication on the Internet to travel outside the country and wants all such traffic to be routed through the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), a government-supported not-for-profit organisation that facilitates exchange of domestic Internet traffic.
“Many email and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) users in India rely on services of foreign origin ... communication made through these services can be accessed by the government of other countries, where the servers for providing these services are hosted, by invoking the provisions of their laws,” says the latest report of the Department of Telecommunications, prepared by the working group on Telecom for the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17).
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“A lot of intra-government communication is classified. The security of this communication has to be ensured by an alternative mechanism because neither is it advisable to wait for such a mandating and capacity building nor is it appropriate to rely on the level of security provided by such a scheme as communication would still remain in the open domain of Internet,” the report says.
Pointing to “capacity constraint” of the current Indian system that allows traffic to flow outside the country, the report says that an investment of Rs.450 crore is needed to “develop and deploy a pan-India secure network and network-based services such as email, VoIP mobile communication through a survivable and available network architecture for secured communication for government use.”
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Wireless communication
While Rs.300 crore would be spent on establishing a fixed and wireless communication system for high security of classified government communication, Rs.100 crore would be for operational expenditure for the next five years and Rs.50 crore for research and development.
Interestingly, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) already has an internal system of communication that acts like a private Internet system, connecting various centres working on crucial defence projects, thus securing it from any kind of hacking or interception.
Located in Delhi, the Defence Scientific Information & Documentation Centre (DESIDOC)'s main function is collection, processing and dissemination of relevant technical information for DRDO scientists.
It also provides secure e-mail and Internet connectivity to DRDO labs through the networks of ERNET (of Dept. of Electronics) and NICNET (of the Planning Commission).